EDITORIAL: Avoiding escalation

U.S. President Barack Obama meets with the National Security Council in the Situation Room on Thursday morning. (PETE SOUZA / AP / The White House)

As rivers of poppies, darkened lights and oceans of commentary marked The Great War centenary, this is sadly not a world of peace for many innocent and terrorized people.

Densely inhabited Gaza is a killing field where civilian deaths are guaranteed as the Israeli forces and Hamas exchange deadly fire over missile sites and assault tunnels. Eastern Ukraine is another scene of violence and refugees as the Western-backed Kyiv government battles insurgent Russian-speaking separatists armed and to some degree instigated by Vladimir Putin’s Moscow. The fanatical Islamic State (ISIS) terrorist army, a regrouping of former al-Qaida and Saddamist die-hards, is devouring cities of northwestern Iraq like a plague of locusts, subjecting minorities to convert-or-die atrocities in pursuit of its fantasy of a theocratic thug state.

Each of these conflicts is a terrible human tragedy.

But what we don’t have is a world war. And the primary lesson of 1914 is that great powers should strive mightily to keep it that way as they deal with intransigent crises.

They should not allow ethnic or sectarian conflicts, in the Balkans of 1914 or in the Middle East or Ukraine of today, to escalate into confrontations between major powers. That only risks far more death and destruction than the original crisis could produce. (See Elissa Barnard’s account today of the suffering of her grandfather and his siblings.) Nor does it address the root issue that pluralistic states and societies created by history will fail unless old hatreds are put to rest.

The failures of 1914 show us that great powers can destroy themselves, along with millions of lives, if they don’t value peace highly enough and foolishly make local conflicts worse.

But making them better may involve different sorts of restraint. In Ukraine, where the killing of innocent civilians (and air passengers) is as repugnant as in Gaza, both the West and Russia should power down the rhetoric, the over-simplifications of Ukraine’s internal conflicts and useless sanctions fights. They should focus on brokering a peaceful and stable resolution (and eventually the return of Crimea) while there is still a chance to prevent this conflict from becoming a permanent source of violence, instability and debilitating uncertainty for Russia and Ukraine.

In Iraq, U.S. President Barack Obama showed another face of credible restraint this week. He approved limited air strikes against ISIS to prevent the massacre of Yazidi refugees and to support the defence of the Kurdish capital, Erbil, where U.S. diplomats are stationed. In preventing an atrocity and providing air support for Kurdish defenders, the only civilized authority in northern Iraq, Mr. Obama exercised a double sort of restraint. He kept the military response to an effective minimum. But he also set a limit on the degree to which Americans can realistically expect to stay out of Iraq.

As in 1914, doing nothing to save innocent lives is no more credible than doing too much sabre-rattling to save face.